Theoretical Frameworks
This dissertation is grounded in the theoretical foundations of socio-cultural constructivist theories of learning originating from Dewey (1916), Vygotsky (Lowenthal & Muth, 2009; Roth & Lee, 2007), and Papert (Papert & Harel, 1991). This constructivist paradigm adopted a relativist ontology, suggesting there are many possible realities, and a subjectivist epistemology whereby the researcher and participant co-create shared understanding (Denzin & Lincoln, 2013). Interpretivist research strived to construct knowledge from individual meaning and viewpoints (Tomaszewski et al., 2020). The interpretive researcher is described as a bricoleur (Denzin, 2017; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) informed by “personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity and those of the people in the setting; one who stitches, edits, and puts slices of reality together” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 5). In this research, I pushed this notion of researcher as bricoleur by applying a crystallization approach (Ellingson, 2009) through my active and creative mixing of elements into something precious and worthy of recognition. I further explored crystallization in the methodology section of this dissertation.
This research is further framed by a ‘post’ paradigm since I “question totalizing truths and certainty, reject grand theories and master narratives that tidily explain a phenomenon, and resist the idea that, with just more research, we can better control the world” (Tracy, 2020, p. 55). As a scholar with a post-paradigm view, I considered knowledge and power as "fragmented, multiple, situated, and multi-faceted” (Tracy, 2020, p. 56). Although I ponder issues of power and hegemony, my research examines the layers of reality experienced by open educational practitioners in faculties of education in Canada. From this approach, I explore the lived experiences that emerge through teacher educators’ agency and choice (Tracy, 2020) as media and digital literacies are acquired and applied.
As a post-paradigm scholar, I recognized that meaning is dependent on the signs, signifiers, and relationships between textual elements residing within a context, where the conception of text is extended to incorporate multiple and varied communicative formats such as images, video, audio, and multimodal compositions (Gee, 2011; Kress, 2010). From this post-paradigm stance, this crisis of representation suggested that the meaning of images and text constantly shift and intertwine, that "explanations and descriptions are unstable and relational", and that “one type of text is not necessarily more real than another” (Tracy, 2020, p. 56). In this way, I not only examined texts that are rhizomatically interwoven and interconnected, but also created and shared texts emerging from this research that are multi-faceted, interdependent, and relational (Ellingson, 2009; Tracy, 2020).